(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After years of rumors circulating within the industry that the company is using server-packed shipping containers, Google (www.google.com) finally confirmed these speculations Wednesday by presenting to a room full of data center engineers the details of how it used the containers in its first data center project in the fall of 2005, according to a report on Data Center Knowledge.
Jimmy Clidaras, director of data center R&D at Google, outlined the company’s use of containers in a presentation at the first Google Data center Efficiency Summit in Mountain View, California.
Referred to as Data Center A, the 75,000 square feet data center has a power capacity of 10 megawatts, a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.25, and a total density of 133 watts per square foot.
The company did not specify the exact location of the data center, however, based on its timeline it is likely one of the facilities within the company’s three-building data center complex in The Dalles, Oregon.
The data center has a container hanger equipped with 45 containers, with some of the containers stored on a second-story balcony.
The shipping containers have an immense capacity, with each container holding up to 1,160 servers. Also, each container uses 250 kilowatts of power, with a total power density of more than 780 watts per square foot.
The data center’s design enables the containers to run at a temperature of 81 degrees in the hot aisle.
Though this is certainly not uncommon in many of the advanced data centers today, it was certainly remarkable back in 2005 when the facility was first constructed.
Designed with a “power above, water below” strategy, Clidaras said the racks are actually hung from the container’s ceiling.
Meanwhile, the cooling is distributed from below the floor into the hot aisle through a raised floor. It is then sent through the racks before it is finally returned through a plenum situated behind the racks.
The cooling fans are variable speed and tightly managed, allowing the fans to run at the lowest speed required to cool the rack at that moment.
In October 2007, Google was given a patent for its Modular Data Center, a data center built within an intermodal shipping container.
Additionally, the company mentioned containers in a patent filing for a floating data center that creates its own electricity using wave energy.
Urs Holzle, head of Google’s data center operations, said that Google has been an advocate of using containers since it began developing its prototype in 2003.
Data center containers have long been used by the US military, while the first commercial product was released in October 2006 with Sun Microsystems’s Project Blackbox.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced in July that it would tentatively finish construction on its new container data center in Northlake, a Chicago suburb, in the first half of October. However, the company has yet to complete the data center.
Many believe that Dell may be the next IT equipment provider to move into the containerized data center space.
The company announced last May that it is developing a data center based on a stackable shipping container that will “extend beyond a one-off box.”
